Posts Tagged ‘Predictability’

Jim Highsmith launched his new blog/website last week. I have no doubt whatsoever it will be a thought leadership blog. Moreover, knowing Jim I would expect the blog will address and integrate concepts and ideas from numerous disciplines, not “just” from software methods.

So the bottom line for technical debt. It’s expensive to fix, but much more expensive to ignore. Technical debt reduces future earnings, but even more critically, it destroys predictability which in turn impacts market capitalization in the near term, not in the future.

Jim’s post nicely closes the {financial –> technical –> financial} loop. Ward Cunningham’s original debt metaphor borrowed the financial term to apply it to software development. Jim is now bridging from the technical arena back to the financial world.

If you are into any form of agility – technical, managerial or business – you owe it to yourself to follow Jim’s blog.

I had the pleasure of meeting some old colleagues a few weeks ago. They work for a software company that pays a lot of attention to software engineering practices and invests heavily in software tools. Financial results, however, have not been great over the past few years.

Obviously, the disparity between the strength of the software engineering discipline and the relative weakness of the financial results is due to more than a single cause. One factor, however, was highlighted time and time again by my colleagues:

Predictability is killing us!

Paradoxical that this observation might seem, it is actually quite straightforward. Senior management in their company is really forceful about predictability. Hence, initiative, (affordable) experimentation and innovation have pretty much faded away. For most practical purposes it has become a check-the-box culture. All attempts to substitute reliable delivery for predictability seem to have failed so far.

One last “ingredient” to add to the story. This company is rich in talent. Generally speaking, the folks in the engineering trenches are gifted, knowledgeable, capable and dedicated.